Victory laps as environmental future enters a policy hollow

Comment Mark Kenny

The imaginary banner behind Tony Abbott might have read ''Emission accomplished!'', such was his obvious delight as he strode to the lectern on Thursday.

The wordsy Abbott would probably have enjoyed the pun, too.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt, accompanying him for the victory lap in the prime ministerial courtyard, perhaps less so.

As minister, the formerly pro-carbon price Hunt had achieved the very policy aim he and Abbott had explicitly set course for. And he was duly thanked.

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Yet there was a sense about Hunt that he was already turning his mind to the fact that, on his watch, Australia had just entered a policy hollow. It might have been simple exhaustion, but Hunt's pallid countenance reminded one of the truism that, sometimes at the instant of victory, the heart stands still.

Not Abbott's though.

Abbott is not torn over scrapping the carbon tax nor burying the emissions trading scheme it would have led to, believing both to be a waste of money and removing them to be his best-known promise.

''Useless and destructive,'' he called the policy.

More than anything else, Abbott's win last year was built on the very foundations of Julia Gillard's carbon tax backflip, a fact no one can gainsay.

Yet for all the clarity on that point, it is also true the election was fought on the common plinth of global warming as fact, and with a bipartisan commitment to Australia's minimum 5 per cent emission reduction target by 2020.

Now that is in doubt.

Hunt insists it can still be achieved through its Direct Action policy. Few scientists and economists agree. Besides, it relies on a Senate that is playing hard to get.

Tellingly, Abbott opened the batting for the next election by declaring he would henceforth regard as synonymous the idea of a carbon tax and a tradeable emissions permit market with the price influenced by a cap and set by demand.

In other words, Bill Shorten can propose whatever he likes because, for Abbott, it will simply be a tax.

The battlelines are drawn.

Carbon politics, like the environmental damage they are supposed to address, are not going away any time soon.